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Sapphire: Business ByDesign to be broken into "mini suites"

Sapphire: Business ByDesign to be broken into "mini suites"

In the end Business ByDesign didn’t make it – or at least not in its originally planned form.

Last week SAP senior management admitted that it had considered canning the low end Cloud ERP offering but had decided instead to keep on keeping on. But at the Orlando Sapphire conference the company’s new head of Cloud strategy Lars Dalgaard admitted that ByD in its original form wasn’t viable.

"Business ByDesign was a beautiful vision but it was too big. Everyone does not want to put all their apps out in the Cloud in one go. It was intimidating," he said.
So now what was ByD will be broken into smaller chunks that are more digestible. "There are going to be mini suites," confirmed Dalgaard.
Meanwhile SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe stated that that stance taken by Oracle and Microsoft towards Cloud apps wouldn’t work based on SAP’s experience.
"It is a fundamental mistake to take an app that is designed for on-premise and put it in the Cloud,” he said. “We know this because we worked on Business ByDesign. The fact that they [Oracle and Microsoft] started to create them [Fusion and Dynamics] six years ago, tells you they cannot have been creating them with the Cloud in mind."
Dalgaard explained that SAP’s Cloud strategy will now be executed by a business unit focused around a number of key areas:
  • People: Global payroll software is offered as a Cloud-based offering integrated with SuccessFactors' core human resources (HR) solution, Employee Central. The solution is planned to be available in 10 countries, and is today leveraged by a number of strategic partners as a platform to offer business process outsourcing (BPO) services.
  • Money: SAP announced the planned availability of the SAP Financials OnDemand solution, targeted for large enterprise customers to manage their core financials as well as order-to-cash and invoice-to-pay processes. It is planned to be integrated with SuccessFactors' core HR solution Employee Central. In addition, SAP intends to deliver a new release of the SAP Travel OnDemand solution with additional integration and mobile capabilities, including the ability to capture and process expenses directly from a mobile device.
  • Customers: The SAP Sales OnDemand solution delivers new marketing and social selling capabilities, new configurability and customisation tools, and new integration to on-premise SAP Business Suite software, including the SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application.
  • Suppliers: SAP Sourcing OnDemand solution for strategic sourcing, supplier and contract lifecycle management is integrated with on premise with SAP Business Suite, as well as its business networks solutions, including the SAP Information Interchange OnDemand solution, for networked-based invoice management and information exchange for the procure-to-pay process.

"What is apparent is that SAP is demonstrating how seriously it is taking SaaS," said Angela Eager of research house TechMarketView. "It has declared this before but there are some key differences this time around that are best summed up by comments from co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe. One was that SAP has learned from its past Cloud forays. Another was that Lars Dalgaard (CEO of acquired SuccesFactors and now head of SAP’s cloud business) has Cloud-only DNA.

"To use SAP’s words, the company is ‘extegrating” (as opposed to integating - ie although the Cloud is integal to the overall business, the company has set up a Cloud division to enable it to develop as it needs to), to try and make its latest Cloud initiative succeed."

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